HISTORY OF SCIENCE 57 



If Buckle were right all history would be included in the history 

 of science. There are other things to consider. 



Moral factors do not deserve the contempt which Buckle 

 showed them and I think that it is even possible to construct an 

 ethical interpretation of history. To give a moral significance to 

 history, the essential condition is to make it as complete, as sincere 

 as possible. Nothing is more demoralizing than histories ad usum 

 T)elphini. We must display the whole of human experience, the 

 best and worst together. The greatest achievement of mankind is 

 indeed its struggle against evil and ignorance. Nothing is nobler 

 than this endless struggle between the truth of to-day and that of 

 yesterday. It stands to reason that if one side of the picture is not 

 shown — the evil side, for instance — the other loses a great deal of 

 its interest. The quest for truth and beauty is indeed man's glory. 

 This is certainly the highest moral interpretation which history 

 allows. 



We must try to humanize science, better to show its various 

 relations with other human activities — its relation to our own 

 nature. It will not lower science; on the contrary, science remains 

 the center of human evolution and its highest goal; to humanize it 

 is not to make it less important, but more significant, more impres- 

 sive, more amiable. 



The new humanism — as I venture to call the intellectual move- 

 ment that has been defined in the preceding pages — will also have 

 the following consequences : it will disentangle us from many local 

 and national prejudices, also from many of the common prejudices 

 of our own time. Each age has, of course, its own prejudices. Just 

 as the only way to get rid of local prejudices is to travel, — simi- 

 larly, to extricate ourselves from time-narrowness, we must wander 

 through the age?. Our age is not necessarily the best or the wisest, 

 and anyhow it is not the last! We have to prepare the next one, 

 and I hope a better one. 



If we study history, it is not through mere curiosity, simply to 

 know how things happened in the olden times (if we have no 

 other purpose than this, our knowledge would indeed be of a poor 



